Sweeping changes to the surveillance of Meta’s social media platforms have put the technology company on a collision course with lawmakers in the United Kingdom and the European Union, experts and political figures have said.
Lawmakers in Brussels and London criticized Mark Zuckerberg’s decision to eliminate fact-checkers in the United States for Facebook, Instagram and Threads, with one calling it “pretty scary.”
Changes to Meta’s global policies on hate content now include allowing users to call transgender people “it,” with guidelines stating: “We allow accusations of mental illness or abnormality when based on gender or orientation sexual”.
Chi Onwurah, a Labor MP and chair of the House of Commons science and technology committee, who is investigating how online misinformation fueled last summer’s riots, said Zuckerberg’s decision to replace professional fact-checkers with users monitoring the accuracy of posts was “concerning” and “pretty scary.”
“Hearing that Meta is removing all of its fact-checkers (in the United States) is concerning…people have a right to be protected from the harmful effects of misinformation,” he said. “The fact that Zuckerberg has said he is following X’s lead should raise concern when we compare how X is a platform for misinformation to a greater extent than Facebook.”
Meta said it would rely on social media users to fact-check each other’s posts in a “community notes” system similar to that adopted by Elon Musk on X. It has raised concerns about misinformation emanating from the US about topics such as elections, health, pandemics and armed conflicts and spread to digital sources around the world, where Meta has more than three billion users.
On Wednesday, Nobel Peace Prize-winning American-Filipino journalist Maria Ressa predicted that “extremely dangerous times” lie ahead for journalism, democracy and social media users. He faced criminal charges after publishing articles critical of former Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte. He said Meta was going to “allow lies, anger, fear and hate to infect everyone on the platform.”
Meta’s move, which Zuckerberg made clear was a response to Donald Trump’s incoming presidency, also prompted predictions that the Trump administration is facing a significant challenge against laws like the Online Safety Act.
Former UK technology minister Damian Collins said such a challenge “will likely be through trade negotiations in which pressure will be brought to bear on the UK to accept US standards for digital regulation.”
He said: “We must stand firm against such proposals, which would eliminate any possibility of us having to hold technology executives accountable and require them to enforce the security standards on their platforms set out in our laws.”
A Meta whistleblower told The Guardian: “I am extremely concerned about what this means for teenagers.”
Arturo Béjar, a former senior engineer whose responsibilities at Meta included child safety measures, said: “They will be increasingly exposed to all the categories of content that they need to be protected against.”
Harmful content, including violent or pornographic material, could more easily reach young users, Bejar said, citing Zuckerberg’s statement that addressing “less serious” transgressions will now rely on users flagging content before it is released. Goal act on it.
In Brussels, the European Commission responded to Zuckerberg’s statement on Tuesday in which he cited Europe as a place with “an increasing number of laws that institutionalize censorship, referring to the EU’s own Digital Services Law. that regulates online content.”
A spokesperson for the EU’s executive arm said that “we absolutely reject any claims of censorship” and that “absolutely nothing in the Digital Services Act obliges or requests or asks a platform to remove legal content.”
Zuckerberg has said his policy of getting rid of fact-checkers applies only in the United States for now, but his broadside against Europe has raised concerns that he is planning to implement the approach in Europe.
Meta will face intense regulatory scrutiny if it does so in the UK and EU, said Arnav Joshi, senior technology lawyer at law firm Clifford Chance.
“If there is a move away from human fact-checkers and towards greater automation, regulators will want to see evidence of the effectiveness of these changes – this has proven difficult to quantify and justify in the past.”
Valérie Hayer, MEP and leader of the centrist Renew Europe group in the European Parliament, said: “The EU will continue to make social media giants uncomfortable by defending the integrity and independence of free expression and democratic processes. Europe will never accept manipulation and misinformation as the standard for society. By abandoning fact-checking in the United States, Meta is making a profound strategic and ethical mistake.”
Oliver Marsh, a former Downing Street adviser and head of technology research at Algorithmwatch, a Berlin and Zurich nonprofit, said: “If these policy changes mean that lies can be spread that end in attacks on groups, then there is the case that Meta would be going against the EU digital services law. The question is, does Zuckerberg care? Their decisions (and the increasing likelihood that they will refuse to comply with any coercive measures to impress Trump) bring us closer to the time when the EU may have to decide whether it has powers to ban Meta or how else it could hold them to account. “
While Meta said content about suicide, self-harm and eating disorders would still be considered “high severity violations” and “will continue to use our automated systems to look for such high severity content,” the NSPCC, the UK’s child protection organization . charity, expressed his concerns.
Rani Govender, its regulatory policy manager for child online safety, said: “Meta needs to establish how the risks of harm to children in the UK are not increased by the removal of fact-checkers in the US and its changes to content policies”.